Posters, Photos At UConn Capture Anti-War Spirit Of Vietnam Era

While we ponder the recent sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s end, another conflict’s anniversary looms. This one nearly touched off a second civil war — on American college campuses, in the streets and on The Mall in Washington, D.C.

That conflict, the so-called Vietnam War, ended on April 30, 1975, when a helicopter landed on the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon to remove the remaining American personnel and leave desperate civilians clinging to the ascending chopper’s landing gear. That conflict, never an officially declared war, was an 11-year experiment in “anti-communism” by the U.S. Congress, which unanimously passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, and the President (Johnson, then Nixon), who was given carte blanche by the resolution.

That uncivil war is the backdrop to “Remembering the Vietnam War,” a provocative, if limited, exhibition at the William Benton Museum at UConn-Storrs. Because the Benton is a museum of art, the objects on view are protest posters, photographs, handbills, original paintings and photomontages inspired by the dissent that roiled the nation and saw a sitting president react with seeming indifference to the death of four college students at Kent State University and pardon the man responsible for the massacre of 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

“Remembering the Vietnam War” is dominated by artists, or art collectives, that did not sign their work. In fact, the most effective work here is anonymous: “America Eats Her Young” (a black-and-white silkscreen that riffs on Goya’s horrific “Saturn Devouring His Young”); “Stop the War” (riffing on Picasso’s “Guernica”); “American Gothic” (a satire using Grant Wood’s iconic painting); “Johnson’s Johnson” (a creepy drawing of an LBJ statue with no genitals); “Four More Years?” (which uses a photograph from My Lai to make its gory point). Most of these artifacts are taken from UConn’s stellar Poras Collection of Vietnam War Memorabilia.

Of the signed work, the highlights are three photomontages by Martha Rosler, part of her “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, in Vietnam,” (1967-72); Seymour Chwast’s “End Bad Breath,” a 1967 seriagraph; photographs of antiwar demonstrations by LeRoy Henderson; and two gouache-on-paper works by Nancy Spero that are, though somewhat muddled and sloppy, important for having been done so early (1966). The Johnny-Come-Lately award goes to Peter Max, the commercial artist who made a fortune coopting and popularizing hippie graphics and psychedelic art. His “Dove,” from 1971, makes one wonder if Max became a peacenik just in time to cash in on the tail end of the antiwar movement.

The war in Vietnam was a tragic mistake, as nearly every college student in America with a conscience could have told the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. Left behind in the war’s wake were the deaths of 58,220 U.S. soldiers, 1.1 million Vietnamese and 2 million Laotians and Cambodians. It also left behind the birth of, among others, the guest curator of this exhibition, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, director of UConn’s Asian and Asian American Studies Institute, whose biological father was an American soldier and mother a Cambodian woman he abandoned when she got pregnant. Born in 1974 outside the Udoin Royal Thai air force base in Thailand, home base of the CIA’s Air America, Schlund-Vials was put up for adoption. Her personal history, she writes, “brings into focus war-driven rupture and conflict-oriented union” that dominates her own scholarship. Of the Vietnam War, she says, “I am both haunted by it and necessarily drawn to it.”

If only more Americans could say the same. Very little has been left unsaid about the Civil War, but a collective amnesia seems to envelop the Vietnam War. Thus, the placement of “Remembering the Vietnam War” on a university campus is both appropriate and important.

On Friday, May 1, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., the Benton will host a “salon” about “Remembering the Vietnam War: Legacy & Reflections.”

REMEMBERING THE VIETNAM WAR will be on view through Aug. 9, at the William Benton Museum of Art, 245 Glenbrook Road, Unit 3140, Storrs. For more information, call 860-486-4520 or visit benton.uconn.edu.